Laughing Chickens is a Marin County, California-based workshop that’s been making beautiful hen houses and runs exclusively from reclaimed redwood fence boards. With interest in their designs coming from all corners of the country, the eco-minded company has recently re-designed their coops as DIY constructions that fit into bicycle boxes so they can easily be transported at lower costs.

Designer and co-founder, Kristian Hansen, is an avid cyclist who commutes from San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge into Mill Valley. For a year he wondered how he could spread the business beyond the San Francisco Bay Area and take it nationwide. To ship a fully manufactured coop from their workshop across the country would cost more than the price of the coop alone. One day the idea came to him that bike boxes were the solution to his problem:

“Mountain biking was invented on the slopes of Mount Tamalapis, we happen to also be the home of Muir Woods and raw, untouched redwood forests. Combining the waste of discarded redwood fences into functional works of art and utilizing recycled bicycle boxes is a no-brainer,” Hansen said.

Cael Kendall, who started Laughing Chickens out of a desire to reuse wood destined for the dumps couldn’t agree more with Hansen’s sentiments, saying: “Raising chickens help families become more independent from supermarkets. It allows them to raise their families with healthy and sustainable food sources. The addition of our DIY kit makes our coops available to more people.”

Kendall’s original hen house and run designs were amended to fit the dimensions of a bike box. The collaborative effort between the two founders is striking a chord with customers and judges alike. Their 2012 entry in the Marin County Fair won Best of Show and this month you can find their chicken coop featured on the front cover of Williams-Sonoma’s Agrarian Catalog.